A. Quinton — Nov. 16th 2015

Today I want to take you back to a slightly more innocent time: the mid-1980s. It was a time when literally any family-friendly film might be wadded into a ball of bright colours, cheap animation and baggy plaid overshirts and then crammed into a hopefully-lucrative Saturday morning cartoon slot.

The gamble paid off for Columbia Pictures with Ghostbusters, but it did not work for Atlantic Entertainment, who tried to turn the Michael J. Fox comedy film Teen Wolf into a cartoon series that threw out pretty much everything from its parent film except some character names and the premise “there is a teen, who is also a werewolf”.

The series ran for 21 episodes between 1986 and 1987 before disappearing in the paperwork shuffle that accompanied one of the many entertainment conglomerate mergers of the era. It wasn’t a hit. It didn’t even have a consistent schedule, I don’t think – I only ever saw it once, when a local TV station needed to fill time when a live event ended early.

Some Googling will find random episodes on various video streaming sites, but as of today there’s no legal modern way to watch the show. That’s why I’m grateful for everyone who shared this Retro 80s post on Tumblr today. This one GIF contains everything you need to know about television in the 1980s.